5.16.2010

So, after referencing it in my last post, I'm resurrected my draft from May on feederism and trying to complete it just to get my thoughts out there on the subject now that it has renewed relevance.As usual, its disorganized, and probably has a lot of typos. Enjoy. Or not.

I've not been paying enough attention to the fat-o-sphere for the last month or so, but I gather another dust-up has arisen concerning feederism as the continued media. These always frustrate me because any time paid on feederists by fat acceptance is not only a waste of time, its genuinely counterproductive. Its bad enough that we have to deal with a media that will fall all over themselves to give attention to this. We don't need to be contributing.

Feederism is a red herring. It doesn't exist in any meaningful way. I've been tuned into the fat admirer community, which has been seriously warped and damaged by feederist interests, to know this very well. Its a pointless thing to waste any time or energy on because it is so close to fictional, it gets fictional's mail sometimes by accident and walks over to give it back. We are wasting our time on a fantasy with only slightly more of a foot-hold in reality than furries.

And I hate to be all "a pox on both your houses" but both sides of the debacle are making a mistake caring about it. The condemners for mistaking this for something that matters, and the apologists for mistaking feederism for having anything to do with fat acceptance. Or even fat most of the time. Oh, I get how you are confused. Feederists want that confusion and promote it. But its bullshit. There are exceptions, but feederists on average are as fat hostile and fat stigmatizing as the rest of the world. Even those who celebrate fat on some level are very unlikely to actually respect it. The knee-jerk endorsement of fat-hatred mentality with regards to fat is especially widespread among feederists. Of course fat is unhealthy. The "feeders" (those who want others to gain weight) almost always accept this en masse. For some, this is why they actually will abandon their fetish at the slightest hurdle. For others, belief in this is why they want people to gain weight to begin with. For them, its about degradation and destruction. Fat stigmatization is either something the accept as justified or a useful tool to control their targets. Yeah, a couple feederists might buck this trend, and to be fair far more "feedees" (those who want to gain weight) are sympathetic to FA. By in large, though, this is a community as hostile if not more hostile to fat acceptance than everyone else.

Which gives way to the real problem. The feederists who do profess to endorse FA often have an ulterior motive and one which the media readily invents anyway. Its the exact same as dieters who want to use fat acceptance to promote dieting. Its not about supporting FA. Its about subverting it. Its about promoting their fetish as the ultimate expression of FA. Something which completely misses the point in almost a mirror image of dieters who insist the purpose of "Size Acceptance" is accepting the size you think you should be. The wild thing is that while both want to remake FA on the extremes of what it ISN'T, both serve up a lovely narrative to the media about how extreme actual fucking fat acceptance is. Either through contrast or association, both want to actual fat acceptance to be drowned out. Worst of all, neither of them have the honesty with themselves to see that. They'll insist on their self-righteousness that the consequences of their attacks become utterly meaningless and unacknowledged.

But that's all about what forces within the feederist community want to do. As we're seeing again, the media is just eager to lump feederism and fat acceptance into one great big bag they can look at scornfully. The distinctions are meaningless when you are really just interested in rendering people with broad slashes that don't remotely resemble reality. For the "mainstream", feederists just validate everything they tell themselves about what fat acceptance is. It doesn't matter that they are wrong. They just need to look at feederists for them to feel right enough.

This, in turn, fuels the "kinder, gentler fat stigmatization" compromise that often falsely presented as a middle ground. Some even go as far as to label this "polite" fat hatred as being the essence of fat acceptance in what is really a grotesque misreading of the issue as flawed as the feederists who do the inverse. Fat acceptance isn't about forcing your body to be the size someone thinks it ought to be. Even in the instances when that someone is yourself. Its about learning to love your body for what it is and develop a peaceful cohabitation with your body. Not an adversarial relationship, no matter how soothing you may want to render your body stigmatization. The truth is, we can't remake our bodies in our image of what they ought to be. The big secret of the feederists is that weight gain actually is extremely hard for most people and effectively out of reach for quite a few of the limited number of aspirants. Much like weight loss efforts fail at extraordinarily high rates, so does weight gain for far more people than you might think if you listen to the casual denunciations of fat people in our society. People who actually are trying to eat themselves fat tend to have a very hard time of it.

See, for most people, wishing, hoping, and praying doesn't mean much in the end. Insisting that you need to lose weight is of little consequence. Demanding that you want to gain weight likewise quite often. Weight manipulation doesn't become an achievable goal just by wanting it bad enough. The notion that this is what fat acceptance is actually about it terribly misses what fat acceptance really IS about and what it has always been about it. Feederists and dieters alike choose not to get that when they try to co-opt fat acceptance for their own purposes, but none of that is respectful to FA and deserves no respect in return. We don't need a civil rights movement to promote people wanting to have whatever body they think they were supposed to have. We need this to fight for respect and dignity for the bodies we have. Whoever wants to encroach on that should think long and hard before they trample over this fight to flatter themselves.